


Hardly Sanctuary

by orphan_account



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Biting, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/F, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Omegaverse, Scent Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 11:49:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14810790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Alpha!Faith reels Omega!Rook in through the bliss.





	Hardly Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

> edited 6/27 because I had a shower thought of a vague part being easy to misinterpret LMAO this is why minimalism is bad

Blowing up bliss tanks is a gamble when it comes to danger close. Now, Rook is decidedly not in Kansas anymore.

Faith tugs on her wrists, about to lead her—Faith stops. Something flits across her face. "Oh." Faith stills. "Oh." She smiles brilliantly up at Rook. Rook could just bask in it. Except—Rook can guess what has been noticed.

Rook yanks her hands free. It's none of Faith's damn business. How does this work? How can Faith tell? This hallucination probably should have known from the start, or not at all. The apparition herself is ambiguously scent-less in the way that everything in the bliss is mildly pleasant and inoffensively nonspecific.

The flesh-and-blood Faith is an alpha like her brothers, supposedly presiding over the Henbane in the real world. Rook can't remember anything noticeable from the one time she had seen Faith, the person, during the train wreck attempt at arresting Joseph Seed. The church had been a wash of unwashed scents. And there is nothing in these little visions. She has no idea what Faith is like.

"Where are you?" Faith asks. Her brows draw up in an expression of worry tinged with irritation. Then, her expression evens out, the same way she smooths her hand over wrinkles in her dress. Her voice lifts like she has been laughing, though she hasn't. "You should be with us."

Rook swats a blue butterfly away. Another appears, already attached to her wrist. She has spent too much time in the woods to not be fantastic at killing insects. Used to be those were your main kind of enemy, after all. Before bliss frenzied wildlife, one would be more concerned with mosquitoes and ticks than bears and cougars. She smacks the butterfly into nothing, lightning-quick. There is no feedback; light filters from between her fingers, but there is no satisfying squish. Robbed again by the sanitized fakeness.

From a completely different direction, Faith says: "Tell me where you are." A peripheral puff of green smoke, Faith's breath at Rook's ear, and Rook about jumps out of her skin. Rook lurches away and trips over nothing. The ground here has the consistency of a stress ball, giving under her feet in ways she doesn't anticipate. Landing on her ass doesn't hurt at all. She marvels at how the dirt doesn't stick to her hands.

Faith kneels down, and beckons Rook closer with an imperious wave.

The gall of it could almost dispel the fog, the combined haze of the bliss and early stage of Heat both, Rook is so instantly incensed. If only. As it is, she levels a glare at Faith. The grass is… too soft… for her to get up. And if she did, it would be to go away, not to comply.

"So, that's how it is." Faith draws her legs up, daintily preserving modesty even as she surges forward. It is less sexy bed-crawl as it is buoyant floating, and she swooshes right into Rook's personal space again. "You will be safe with me. I promise."

This close together, there is a shadow between them against the brightness of the bliss.

Perhaps this is preying on Rook's own knowledge. "Α" for _alpha_ , suddenly on the tip of Rook's tongue. She has thought it, and now the vision echoes. Dream logic. This is hardly her first romp, so maybe there is an element of lucidity. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Trust her hormone-addled brain to twist a Peggie recruitment video into… into…

Faith exhales slowly, this misty sigh that fills up Rook's lungs. Rook would only have to lean up a little to kiss her. Hardly any distance there. Instead, Rook sits back on her elbows, so she can look up at the whiteout sky. If it doubles as showing her throat, shameless the way Rook never is? Well, none of this is real.

"You'll follow," Faith says, sure, "and you'll find me."

 

  
+

 

  
Too hastily, Rook slides down a ladder into homemade bunker. Its owners are long gone, to the cult or some canny paranoia that hopefully took them far out of the county, and Rook is sure she is the only one with access. It wasn't easy figuring this one out, and she has taken care to maintain the hatch's key mechanism.

She lands hard at the bottom. Her teeth clack together. She straightens slowly, testing, because it would be a split-second's recklessness that cost her the biggest. Her luck has a tendency to run out spectacularly. Not now, though, thankfully. Ladders have rungs for a reason. She will just have to remember that. She has time for a few more trips in and out before her heat is in full swing. There are some minor errands to run, conflicting excuses to offer to different groups as to why she will be absent for a few days—no one gets the same story. Anyone who knows her probably thinks it is transparent, but anyone who knows her will respect it.

The bunker has its own doomsday stores, but she is wary of trusting a random person's canning process. She has brought her own food and water. She won't have the stomach for much, so she has packed some of the blandest things possible. Mostly, she has focused on cleaning supplies to scrub the place top to bottom. Before and after! She unshoulders the backpack, not looking forward to working with noxious cleaners, however mild and "dynamic-agnostic" the brands she has picked, but the end result will be worth it.

Rook, an officer of the law, has been squatting in random, abandoned homes so far, when not squatting in random, abandoned bunkers. Sometimes, it gets to her, and she takes a sleeping bag into a shed or something, not that it does much for the technicalities of trespassing. Today, either option seems the furthest thing from viable. She doesn't want weeks-decayed scents of strangers, that are just noticeable enough to irritate without having faded away yet. She wants a room that smells like her. She wants to go home.

Of course, her rented house was burned down early on, according to Dutch. Insurance will be a mess to deal with when this is all over.

When this is all over. One foot in front of the other, the way she'd always heard it. Heat is the immediate concern. Personal feelings, ideal settings? All that is irrelevant. She will be no use to anybody for entire days, and she has to make sure she won't be a liability. These are the problems she can solve now, and needs to solve now. Neutralizing the stale scents here as best she can will be a lot easier than in a family home.

Rook wouldn't say she is looking forward to being sealed up in a minimally ventilated space, but the pros massively outweigh the cons. The only real catch, aside from the hit to comfort, is it might add an extra day to her heat. It might be a wives' tale, but clean, fresh air has always been something she was taught to obsess over during heats.

Rook massages her jaw, and then gets to work.

 

  
+

 

  
Something, something best laid plans. Three days in—when it should be about over—Rook is suffocating. Surely this is some kind of terrible pheromone feedback loop, and she'll be trapped down here forever, wasting away on a caloric deficit that will put her latest stint in the Whitetails in positive-Yelp-review territory. She has to get out. She can't stay here forever. She'll die first. This will kill her.

It's not safe here.

After pulling out a fresh change of clothes, she re-dresses in hurried, jerky movements, like she could be noticed at any moment. The fabric is constricting, but almost reassuring. She buttons up the flannel with trembling fingers, from nerves or low blood sugar or all of it. She has been almost feral from the hormone dump and spike cycle that has had her pacing circles throughout the mornings and hiding under tables in the evening. Putting on clothes makes her feel human again. Awake and almost functional, for the moment.

She's always been a superstitious fuck during heats, always staying in one room and never touching herself. She should have found a decent enough shack in the woods with good airflow, in an overgrown area where heat-scent wouldn't have been too noticeable outside. This bunker was the worst idea. She's eaten hardly half what she'd expected she could tolerate. She feels like a furnace, like eating is wasteful because it will burn up in her gut unused. Instead, she has spent most of her time discovering some new arcane organization system for what supplies she'd brought. It made sense in the moment. Now, looking over the stacks and piles, it feels juvenile.

What she can do is rig this place to blow. Even more wasteful than eating, sure, but then there is no evidence. No scent trail. She can take off and keep moving and if she's smart, it will be fine. She has to believe it will be fine. She thinks… she has an idea. She thinks she knows where she will be going.

 

  
+

 

  
It really is one hell of a surprise to walk in through Faith's door. Rook is a special kind of stupid, falling for something imaginary. What kind of stalker goes after a fantasy like this? Killing guards to get to a princess in a tower?

Moments after Faith appears, she has already rushed down the stairs to meet her. Faith wraps her arms around Rook, careless of the dirt and gore sure to smear on her white dress. The squeezing hug is so instantly familiar, one-sided muscle memory tripped. But this is nothing like the idle visions in almost-sterile drug trips. Faith completely overpowers the odors of blood and gunpowder, like high beams in the oncoming lane at night. It's been all betas here, besides her. Besides them. "I'm glad you came," Faith says into her neck.

Rook is stunned. Yeah. She would fucking bet. The Most Wanted Junior Deputy, heat-fried and pliant. Still, Rook shivers happily at the breath on her skin. The embrace is pleasure-pain, soothing her heart and unkind to her injuries, minor as they each are. But all Rook can think now is that Faith's hair smells amazing, and the thought has Rook shuddering at what a creep she is, truly, really. She'd been so quickly propped up as heroic, and here she is. Melting into the enemy's arms. Pursuing a stranger based on a few erotic dreams.

Faith tugs her along by the wrist, and Rook winces at all the nicks and bruises being jostled as she is hastily led up two sets of stairs. But she follows. Of course she follows. She can't question any of this in any way except eagerly—what next? _Where am I going?_ What does Faith want her to do, really? Does Faith want her to do anything? To recognize this act as the insult it is and fight and die over it? To lie down at Faith's feet and be made into one of her expendable Angels? Rook… would love to know.

At the top, she almost trips Faith up herself with her longer stride, bumping into Faith's back and knocking knees with her. But Faith just spins on her heel, nose bumping Rook's jaw as she leans in to mouth on Rook's neck like an overeager prom date. It's a PG-rated marking attempt, playfully inexpert. And Rook's belly seizes up all the same. Surely Faith really is going to bite her, just not this second.

Faith draws Rook in close, and walks backwards. She is steering without looking. It is the blind leading the blind, because Rook's world shrinks down to the vanishingly small space between them. She can't stop trembling. Down one long hallway they go, then sharply right into a room.

Rook has no eyes for how it is decorated—she can only keep looking down, dazedly taking in the lacework of Faith's dress, the delicate stitching around her collar, how there is the odd bobbly thread that never showed up in the bliss—but the air is layers and layers of Faith's scent. It is immediate in some ways, like Faith was up here before investigating all the commotion, but mostly the scent is ageless from all the traces of scent renewed by each night's sleep. It soaks into Rook's bones like balmy July afternoons, warm and omnipresent.

Faith backs up against the edge of her bed, and sits. Rook blinks down at her, startled at how things pop into focus. Wood walls and floors. A big bay window with a glass vase of bliss flowers. A posed Seed family photo on the wall. A bearskin rug that she just tromped mud over.

They must notice at the same time, because Faith makes a considering hum. "Let's get those shoes off."

She bends forward, and sets to work on unlacing Rook's boots. Rook lets her. Once they are loosened, Faith presses on the tops of the boots with her toes, which acts as a counterweight as Rook docilely pulls her feet free of them. She takes off her own socks, using Faith's shoulder to balance on one foot at a time. For the moment, they are a matched set. Dressed, but barefooted.

Faith clamps down on Rook's wrists. Rook goes stiff from head to toe. It's a ready sort of tension, coiled to spring. If Faith is just playing—Rook couldn't bear it.

"Please," says Rook. All she can manage.

 

  
+

 

  
There's a streak of scrape-burn across Rook's shoulder. Possibly a bullet graze. Or the fallen-meteor path of shrapnel. She hadn't felt it at the time, but now that Faith is tracing the thin line of it, the skin there feels short by several layers. But the touch itself is gentle enough not to hurt. Or it could be endorphins.

Faith says, "We put ourselves through so much so unnecessarily." She smooths that hand down Rook's bare back, taking a crooked path of avoiding other bits of damage. "Don't you agree?"

Rook rolls her good shoulder noncommittally. It is hard to keep her eyes open. She's lying on her belly, warm without burning now, and the days are catching up to her.

"Well," Faith says airily, "that's all behind us." She hitches a leg over Rook's hip. The light, possessive weight of it is reassuring. Rook dozes off.

Rook soon wakes up to a last-hurrah pulse of Heat, mindlessly grabbing at nothing—at everything in reach, pawing at Faith. Faith takes those wandering hands and pins them over Rook's head, and keeps her fingers laced with Rook's, warm and sure. Some smooth maneuvering, and Faith flips her over to straddle her, covering Rook the way she wouldn't let her earlier. This time, Rook has zero complaints.

"You're here because you knew you would be safe here. With me." Faith dusts kisses over Rook's chest. Then, she sinks teeth into her neck. Quick, sharp. A pop of hurt that has Rook unraveling, flying higher than bliss can manage. Rook frees her hands to cradle Faith's face. Faith says, through bloody teeth: "And you are."


End file.
